Tom Roser is an arborist with 15 year's experience in the arboricultural industry and a National Diploma in Arboriculture. He has started a petition after fears of trees being over pruned in Richmond Park which he believes has lead to many dying prematurely. He has contributed the following piece to Nub News to talk about his work and the petition.

I have lived close to Richmond Park all my life. As a child I went there to build dens, climb the trees and explore. This has given me a lifelong interest in nature and conservation. Because of my love of nature, I became a tree surgeon.

A large part of arboriculture is preserving trees, and ensuring that they live for as long as possible. I even used some of the trees in Richmond Park as case studies in my assignments at college when training to become a tree surgeon.

Often you can undertake work to trees that not only ensures public safety, but also benefits the tree.

If a tree has a defect, for example rot in the crown, then you can preserve it through pruning. Pruning prevents branches from snapping and at the same time ensures the safety of passers-by. This benefits the tree and the amenity of the area, and ensures public safety.

I am passionate about preserving trees. Trees will eventually die or become too rotten to retain but I believe trees should be preserved for as long as possible.

Years ago I started to see trees being pruned extremely hard in Richmond Park.

When I first saw this I was concerned, however felt that The Royal Parks must know best.

I became increasingly concerned because trees that I thought had been pruned extremely hard appeared to suffer significant harm. I did not see serious defects that justified the levels of pruning.

When I was scratching my head over why these trees had been pruned, The Royal Parks went and pruned a number of these trees yet again when they did not have a chance of recovering. Some of the trees died following the pruning.

There are trees with significant defects that mercifully only have minor pruning work undertaken to them.

However there are also trees with what I would consider only to have minor defects, that had pruning work that in my view was completely disproportionate. It appears to me that the work later resulted in the death of the tree.

There were three things that made me extremely worried:

Firstly The Royal Parks stated in a professional seminar that The Parks have external consultants that draw up a maintenance schedule for their ancient trees.

However, a member of The Royal Parks said at this seminar that The Parks went against the recommendations of the experts by accelerating the works programs for a number of their ancient trees.

These ancient trees have very little vitality; a heavy prune can easily kill the tree.

With ancient tree management you often only prune one limb or even just a branch to see how the tree responds. After this further pruning should be based on how well the tree responds to treatment. I fear that this is a classic example of trees being made to fit a rigid, inflexible regime.

The second point left me shocked and horrified. I have photos of 345 trees dotted around Richmond Park that appear to have been felled in the last few years. There is a feature on Google Maps that many of you will have explored, called Google Street View. Photos are taken of roads every few years so you can look back at how the trees next to the roads looked over the course of years.

This enabled me to look at the trees before they had been made into high stumps, and what I saw left me cold: I thought that most of these trees were in reasonable condition before they were turned into high stumps by The Royal Parks. In my view, many of these trees could have been preserved.

Thirdly, I know a tree surgeon who previously worked with The Royal Parks and to whom I expressed my concern over the number of trees left as high stumps. He said that they were told to fell the trees to a high stump even though he believed many could have been maintained by simply pruning them.

Oak trees can be maintained for decades even when there is substantial decay. For me leaving so many trees as high stumps when there were other ways of maintaining them is shocking.

All this left me in a very difficult position.

The arboricultural industry is a very small and close-nit group. My worry about speaking out is that I risk giving myself a bad name.

When I first contacted The Royal Parks, a friend wrote on my behalf. Originally I hoped that there would be a simple explanation that would set my mind at ease.

However, The Royal Parks have never responded to my concerns about the works being disproportionate, and my question as to whether there weren't more sympathetic ways of maintaining them.

Even though I have been told that I risk ruining my career by speaking out, I do not believe that keeping quiet with what has been going on in Richmond Park is an option.

I'm not the only person concerned about what is going on in Richmond Park. I have shown the open letter to a number of friends in the arboricultural industry who are more experienced than me, and they share my concerns.

It is clear in the petition comments that other members of the public feel the same.